WAR MACHINE (2017)

David Michod's film for Netflix is a fictionalized adaptation of Michael Hastings' The Operators, itself an expansion of the Rolling Stone magazine expose that led to the fall of General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, in 2010. In real life McChrystal was ruined by Hastings' revelations of hard drinking by his staff, including the now-more-disgraced Gen. Michael Flynn, and open contempt for the Obama administration. All of this plays out, with the names changed, in War Machine, but the film fails to answer the main question it raises on its own: what has all of this to do with the film's main character, or, more pointedly, what does he have to do with the scandal or the ongoing quagmire in Afghanistan.

The fictionalized McChrystal, Gen. Glen McMahon, is played by Brad Pitt, a producer of the film. Pitt is in character-actor mode here, less interested in being a leading man than in making a character, or at least a performance, out of odd postures and a funny voice. McMahon's right hands is often contorted into a kind of claw, while he jogs with a lumbering stride, with his arms hanging almost limp. Michod and Pitt clearly consider the physicality of the actor's portrayal important to the story, showing McMahon shamble through army bases and European cities, but it's hard to figure out what exactly this illustrates apart from Pitt's commitment to the role. Likewise, McMahon's burly burr of a voice sticks out among the generally more naturalistic performances, but not in a good way. It makes McMahon sound like a cartoon character -- at times I thought it might be Pitt's impersonation of George Clooney playing a general in a Coen Bros. film -- when no one else does, except arguably for Anthony Michael Hall as McMahon's apoplectic right-hand man, the Gen. Flynn analogue. I don't know whether Pitt arrived at this performance from studying Stanley McChrystal, following Michod's direction or by making it up himself, but it's a huge distraction, and something is terribly wrong with a movie if you start to think of its star performance as a distraction.

It seems like a distraction because Michod appears to be trying to explain both the fall of the real general and the American failure to secure Afghanistan, but nothing in Pitt's performance really helps explain these things. In part that's a major failing on Michod's own part as the screenwriter, since despite the advantage of dramatic license the script fails to make his fictional general either exceptional (except for Pitt's eccentricities) or explanatory. McMahon himself doesn't really seem like a bad guy. He doesn't share in the excesses of his staff and he makes conscientious efforts both to understand the war from the grunt point of view and to be courteous toward Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president (Ben Kingsley). His main problem seems to be that he sees the war through a haze of organizational jargon and management theory that convinces him that there must be a way to win the war, when others recognize that Afghans will never acquiesce to foreign occupation, no matter what theory you apply to it. In short, for all his apparent virtues McMahon is clueless, but so what? It's not as if he started the war, and it's not as if he was in command long enough to make a difference one way or another, and because of Pitt's mannered performance it's hard to say whether he's a representative U.S. military man. For all I know, Pitt may have made his performance more eccentric than it needed to be because he realized that if he didn't do something to stick out the character of the general would be exposed as a void on screen.

While War Machine has a hollow center it's not a total debacle. When we finally get to see some war, Michod wisely takes the focus off Pitt and gives us a tense battle from the grunt's perspective, climaxing in a soldier's anguished realization that he called a strike on the wrong target. Even Pitt isn't a total loss. After two scenes I decided I'd rather see a two-hander consisting only of Pitt's general and Kingsley's Karzai interacting with each other. In late life Kingsley has become a king of character actors, -- dare I say a mandarin? -- and Pitt raises his game with that kind of partner, as he does during a press-conference showdown with Tilda Swinton as a persistent German critic. Those good scenes, however, expose War Machine as a fragmented collection of vignettes that never really coheres into a compelling story or a distinctive statement on America's Afghan war.

On the Big Screen: AMERICAN SNIPER (2014)

The biggest omission in American Sniper may be American Sniper itself. Nothing in Clint Eastwood's film, apart from the end credits, tells us that his subject, Chris "the Legend" Kyle, wrote a book about himself. You could argue that that's because the film is an adaptation of the book, but Eastwood takes the story beyond the close of Kyle's book to the day he was killed by a disturbed veteran on a supposedly therapeutic firing range. We see Kyle ride off with his eventual killer, but we don't see him signing books or having the least thought of writing one. Yet more than Kyle's record number of kills during his four tours in Iraq, his best-selling memoir is the big reason so many people went to the movies this weekend. I find this an odd omission because Eastwood's film, following not long after J. Edgar, signals a theme for this stage -- he may be 84 but I'm reluctant to call it the last stage -- of the director's career: the process of self-explanation or self-justification for figures who may see themselves as heroes yet are also conscious of some questioning of their heroism. The idea actually goes back at least as far as Unforgiven in Eastwood's work -- recall Little Bill's enthusiasm for telling his story to the dime novelist and his "I was building a house!" appeal for understanding -- while those who saw Jersey Boys might tell us whether this helps that film make sense in the old man's filmography. Showing Kyle (Bradley Cooper) composing his memoir might have made Sniper look too much like J. Edgar for everyone's comfort, and since Eastwood, his co-producer Cooper and their writers were presumably obliged to adapt the memoir faithfully there's less room for the sort of debunking with which Eastwood closes the prior biopic. Yet just as The Bridges of Madison County proved Eastwood a creative interpreter of dubious source material, so we should expect the director to find some room in the screenplay provided for him for his own commentary on Kyle's career. That's the impression I got from earlier reviews who saw Sniper as simultaneously a pro-war and anti-war film, though possibly just as many reviewers see the picture as too unambiguously pro-war for their comfort. Again, obliged to convey Kyle's own view of his life, Eastwood et al must to a great extent call things as Kyle saw them. Yet given Eastwood's own disapproval of the invasion of Iraq -- complicated over time by a certain admiration for George W. Bush's "tenacity," -- can the director really let Kyle have the last word on the subject from the grave?

Your judgment of Eastwood's American Sniper may depend on whether or not you believe that Eastwood believes in the categorization of humanity into three types as expounded by Chris Kyle's father. Chris was taught -- in the film if not the book -- that there are sheep (those naively ignorant of the existence of evil), wolves (evil) and sheepdogs. Interestingly, the sheepdog's primary trait is aggression, redeemed by being channeled into the defense of the herd, the nation, etc. Chris assumes the role early, defending his brother from schoolyard bullies. He sees the War on Terror in the same terms, and Eastwood, Cooper et al have already gotten into trouble with some critics for letting Kyle's judgment of Iraqi insurgents, including women and children, as "evil" (not to mention "savages") go unchallenged in the film.

Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall proceed to problematize this crude worldview in some subtle ways. First of all, the alienation Chris gradually experiences as he shuttles between tours of duty and increasingly troubled stays at home, the detail that seems to earn the film whatever anti-war reputation it has, can be seen as a consequence not just of the stress of counterinsurgent war but of his self-regard as something separate from the civilian sheep. He feels an overwhelming responsibility to protect that makes him feel out of place at home, if not like a quitter once he's home for good. Did the war or his dad do that to him? Was Chris indoctrinated in a way that warped him, as J. Edgar Hoover's mother is shown warping him in the earlier film? Again, a film of Kyle's own book is the wrong place to say so outright, but that very film is structured in a way bound to make some people ask questions. The film also invents a "player on the other side," the Syrian sniper Mustafa whose presence implicitly throws the elder Kyle's categories into question. Like Chris, who had been a rodeo cowboy before enlisting after some 1998 terror attacks, Mustafa is a sportsman -- an Olympic marksman -- who has gone to a foreign land to fight the enemy. Because Mustafa is killing Americans, Chris regards him as evil. He's especially enraged that Mustafa has made videos of his kills -- the closest the antagonist gets to writing his own Syrian Sniper. Mustafa never gets to express his point of view, but the film gives us room to question whether he's really as much a sheepdog as Kyle is, rather than the wolf Kyle assumes him to be. The script contrasts Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) with a more obvious wolf, the al-Qaeda terrorist known as "the Butcher" who tries to discourage collaboration with the Americans by killing or mutilating Iraqi civilians. If I recall right, we never see Mustafa kill civilians. I recall more clearly that Eastwood makes a late attempt to humanize the character before his ultimate showdown with Kyle. When Mustafa gets the call that there are Americans nearby, we see him leaving behind a wife and baby, counterparts to Chris's wife and kids, as he walks past a wall photo of a medals ceremony from more innocent days. It's easy to guess that Mustafa sees himself as a sort of sheepdog, and Americans as the wolves, and if sheepdogs can see each other as wolves that would make Papa Kyle's categories so relative as to be useless for anyone more reflective or introspective than Chris Kyle is shown to be in this picture and, presumably, in his own book. While I may be guilty of giving Eastwood and Hall too much credit, I don't think that they've left material from which to build a critique of Kyle's worldview in the film by accident. But because they've presumably opted to let viewers put the pieces together themselves rather than have anyone in the picture explicitly question the sheepdog idea, many will go home assuming, approvingly or not, that Eastwood endorses it.

If American Sniper is anti-war, it's anti-war in a generic way instead of specifically blaming the peculiarities of the Iraq war for any issues Kyle may have. Eastwood most likely felt an obligation to Kyle's family, and as a relative latecomer to the film project, to leave his own opinion of the invasion out of the movie, but any obligation he felt will still seem like an abdication to people who think any film set in Iraq must tell the truth about the conflict, as they see it. In fact, Eastwood's reticence -- it should be noted that we get no real justification of the invasion, either, apart from Kyle asking whether a buddy would rather fight the enemy in Iraq or at home -- prevents American Sniper from being a definitive film about Iraq, since a definitive film should take one side or the other more strongly than Eastwood ultimately does. Eastwood may be concerned with what war in general does to people, and with how people in war rationalize what they do or become, but his approach arguably leaves him skimming the surface of whatever real story can be found in Iraq. Like J. Edgar, Sniper is dominated by one mighty performance that little else in the picture lives up to. The denial of a Best Director nomination to Eastwood by the Academy may be their acknowledgment that the picture has really been Bradley Cooper's baby all along, and it certainly is his picture. I've come late to an appreciation of Cooper but between American Hustle and this he's clearly become an all-American talent with an intense commitment to diverse roles. No one other than Sienna Miller as Chris's long-suffering wife (and arguably Sheik in a role without English dialogue) makes much of an impression, but the film doesn't really require them to. As an Iraq War movie I don't think it surpasses The Hurt Locker in action or suspense, though Eastwood makes the most of the opportunities created by modern telecommunications to have heartfelt husband-wife chats interrupted by insurgent attacks, and the climactic firefight in a sandstorm is a pretty vivid illustration of the fog of war. The most I can say for American Sniper, apart from what I've said above, is that it's Eastwood's best movie since the deeply underrated Flags of Our Fathers, whose subjects may have found Chris Kyle a kindred spirit.

Update: Since I can't be bothered with reading the book, I'm grateful to Michael and Eric Cummings at Slate for explaining that the "sheepdog" thesis isn't in Kyle's text, but was added to the film by Jason Hall, who adapted it from a 2004 book by an Army colonel. The Cummingses claim that the book, On Combat, has become very popular in right-wing circles, and they make clear that they despise the whole sheepdog concept. What Hall himself thinks of it I can't say, but the resemblances between the way Sniper and J. Edgar show their subjects being shaped by their parents suggest that Eastwood doesn't exactly embrace the idea.

INTIMATE ENEMIES (L'Ennemi Intime, 2007)

France has had a problem with Muslims dating back to the Battle of Tours, when Charles Martel repelled Islam from the high-water mark of its eighth-century incursion into western Europe. A millennium later, France was on the offensive. The conquest of Algeria began in 1830. For France it became a true colony, a place for French people to settle in and virtually an extension of the French homeland. The war for Algerian independence began in the 1950s. I would call it France's Vietnam except that France had its own Vietnam before we Americans did. Yet the Algerian conflict arguably caused even more trauma in France than the Vietnam conflict did in the U.S. In France, reactionaries conspired to overthrow the government rather than accept negotiations leading to Algerian independence. Despite their fury, independence came in 1962.

At one time, we might have been expected to root for France in the conflict and see them as the standard-bearers of civilization and modernity. Today, we're more likely expected to root for the Algerians because, after all, it was their country. Yet Florent Emilio Siri's L'Ennemi Intime finds little to choose from between the French and the FLN or the fellaghin fighters in the countryside. On this film's evidence, Algeria endured not so much a war for independence as two factions of thugs battling to rule a passive majority without caring much for them. Intimate Enemies has no heroes, though it may seem reactionary in its refusal to concede much moral ground to the Algerians. Both sides commit atrocities on both small and large scales, torturing individuals and massacring entire villages. The civilian villager is forced to choose between terror and terror and pays dearly for the wrong choice. Islam has little to do with it all, from what we can tell, since the FLN, like many Third World insurgencies of the era, were secular and socialistic. In time, they would have to deal with a true Islamist insurgency against their "people's government," characterized by the same sort of massacres we see in the movie. Siri's film shows terror stripped of its religious trappings and its nationalist romance. It's a powerful anti-war film for that reason.

Intimate Enemies has a conventional story at its core: the new, green officer arrives in the "forbidden zone" and has his ideals shattered by the savagery of counterinsurgent warfare. The contrast between naivete and ruthless realism isn't absolute, however. The new lieutenant succumbs to the temptation of terror, while the hard-headed sergeant (a Vietnam vet) feels an empathic guilt that drives him to subject himself to the same torture he inflicts on the enemy.

The film really lives up to its title in its portrayal of Algerians fighting alongside the French. We're reminded that many fighting for and against France in 1959 had fought for France -- Free France, that is -- during World War II. The most detailed and complex of the Algerian characters is Danoun, a scarred veteran of the assault on Monte Cassino in Italy. He's an irreconcilable enemy of the fellaghin because the insurgents massacred his village and his family. When the French respect a captured fellaghin who had also fought at Monte Cassino, Danoun, who had struck up a friendly chat with the prisoner earlier, shoots him in the back when the French officers are willing to let him go. Nothing else matters than his current grudge against the fellaghin, yet he proves something of a coward in battle conditions, and when the sergeant orders him at gunpoint to crank up the electricity so the sarge can experience torture, Danoun seems as much tortured by fear and anguish as the sergeant is by the voltage.

While Danoun remains loyal throughout, other natives waver. One seemingly reliable scout seems to go over to the fellaghin, apparently disgusted by a napalm strike, only to be tortured and left for the French to finish off for mercy's sake. A boy becomes the sole survivor of a massacre by fellaghin by hiding in a well; rescued by the French, he becomes a mascot for our main characters, only to turn fellaghin after witnessing another massacre, this time by the French, and the torturing to death of an old man by the once-idealist lieutenant. None of these characters seems imbued by any overriding national consciousness. Each has all too personal reasons for choosing or switching sides. The French, of course, have no choice of sides, though one of our main soldiers chooses another option to quit the war altogether. For French and Algerians alike, the war is a personal ordeal, traumatically different if not unique for each fighting man. Flags and slogans offer neither solace nor escape.

Nearby Morocco substitutes for Algeria and offers Siri and cinematographer Giovanni Fiore Coltellaci an epic landscape against which to shoot their intimate war drama. Siri stages some decent action scenes emphasizing the chaos and panic of guerrilla combat as nature in the form of trees or sheep gets in the way of the combatants. The acting ensemble is solid with Mohammed Fellag as Danoun the standout performer. In some ways L'Ennemi Intime is a generic war film, very much like an American Vietnam film without the jungle or the rock soundtrack. But seeing a generic story in a fresh setting can help us see the whole genre with fresh eyes. The Algerian war is so unfamiliar to most global viewers that Intimate Enemies seems less like a generic war film or a transplanted 'Nam film. That allows us to see war here the way the auteurs see it, and few war films I've seen from any country emphasize as strongly as Siri does how each soldier, despite being part of an army and representing a nation, is morally and psychologically on his own.

On the Big Screen: ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012)

The Academy gets to nominate up to ten movies for Best Picture under its new rules, but there are still only five Best Director nominees. For that reason, the Best Picture nominees are divided by many Oscar-watchers into two tiers, with only those whose directors were nominated assumed to have a real chance for the big prize. Not since 1989's Driving Miss Daisy has the director of the Academy's Best Picture not even been nominated in his own category. Kathryn Bieglow's Zero Dark Thirty was considered one of the Best Picture front runners until the Oscar nominations were announced on January 10. The film received a Best Picture nomination but Bigelow herself, whose previous effort, 2009's The Hurt Locker, earned her the first Best Director award won by a woman, did not get nominated in her own right. It's been rumored that Bigelow was being punished personally, just as Paul Thomas Anderson was presumably punished for offending Scientology, for appearing to endorse torture in her new film about the pursuit and killing of Osama bin Laden. The way I saw it, Zero Dark Thirty portrays torture as an arguably necessary but certainly not sufficient ingredient in bagging the world's most wanted terrorist. The torture shown in the movie was not enough to nail Osama's location in Pakistan, and it should be borne in mind that Mark Boal's screenplay was first written while bin Laden was still at large. Were he still at large now, many viewers might well assume from a different version of Zero Dark Thirty that torture accomplishes nothing. Now that Boal and Bigelow have caught up with events, many people can't help inferring that writer and director consider torture to be necessary, effective and right. Bigelow's tone makes the film a rorschach blot that draws out each viewer's preconceptions. The director herself aims for a naturalistically neutral tone, neither handwringing nor triumphant. We may still be too close to events for some people to tolerate or even understand such a presentation. Many of us still want to know what side Bigelow's on, and many of those can't accept that she may not choose to take a side. A case might be made that she had to take a side, and that if torture isn't explicitly condemned the film has endorsed it. Whether that case would convince everyone is unlikely, but enough people are angered by what they see -- or fail to see -- that Zero Dark Thirty may not be appraised in purely cinematic terms for some time.

It's possible that the film's political critics focus so much on what Boal and Bigelow say or don't say about torture that they miss what the creators seem to be saying about their overall subject, the hunt for bin Laden. The broader view, however, is less neutral than deeply ambivalent. This is not a cheerleading movie unless the viewer assumes that Maya, Jessica Chastain's composite character at the film's center, is meant as an unconditional hero. Chastain gives a heroic performance, climaxing both 2012 as a year of aggressive female characters in cinema and her own meteoric rise since first earning notice in Terence Malick's Tree of Life a year earlier. But the heroism seems exaggerated in a deliberate way, as if writer, director and actress all want us to think twice about the way Maya curses and blusters and vows to "kill" bin Laden or "smoke" other terrorists, or is called a "killer" by colleagues. Unlike her cinematic peers of 2012, Maya is not an action heroine. She never fires a shot in the picture; when terrorists fire on her car in Pakistan she can do nothing than crouch below her bulletproof windshield and reverse the vehicle back into her compound. She may be the mastermind, but it takes the muscle of Navy SEALS, who may as well be her puppets, to actually kill her target, though she gets to declare victory by identifying Osama's corpse. Interestingly, we never get a full shot of the man; all we see is a beard and a nose, as if we as well as the whole world has to take Maya's word that the SEALS have hit what they call the "jackpot." I don't mean that Bigelow is somehow implying that the dead man isn't bin Laden, but she is reinforcing the way this has become Maya's personal quest and vendetta, at a potential expense invoked by the sort of character we're usually programmed to dislike, a male superior who questions Maya's priorities. This character asks a fair question: with new threats to the "homeland" from apparent freelance terrorists, how important was it by 2010 -- how much was it worth in resources -- to get the apparently isolated bin Laden? It would be easy to say that Maya must be right because she's the protagonist, but we know what a film where Maya is unambiguously right would look and sound like, and Zero Dark Thirty doesn't look or sound like that. This questioning attitude toward the hunt for Osama persists as a theme even after it could no longer be underscored by his survival despite all efforts. But some observers clearly believe that the film doesn't do enough questioning about the overall War on Terror, and their attitude is best expressed by one of the movie's own interrogators: an incomplete truth will be treated as a lie. That could be said about any film allegedly based on fact, but some facts will always matter more, and their omission offend more, than others, depending on the observer. Eventually these things will matter less and the film will be judged on something closer to its own terms.

Zero Dark Thirty is an epic procedural told in a restrained pictorial style that might strike some aesthetic critics as cold if not for Chastain's fervor. The procedural format takes us away from the film's early focus on torture as Maya and her colleagues must weigh clues and make guesses that bring them closer to the compound in Abbotabad. Even early on trickery seems to matter more than torture; the prisoner whose torture is portrayed most extensively finally opens up after the interrogators tell him (untruthfully) that he had already begun talking the day before but can't remember because he'd suffered from sleep deprivation. "Tradecraft" rather than torture is the film's real subject, the latter shown as part of the former. The dry procedural material is supplemented by some pure suspense scenes -- the kind when you can tell something bad is going to happen but you're not sure what. We also get short snippets of the Khobar Towers and London terror attacks to remind us that the bad guys remain an active threat. Some will feel that such scenes stack the deck in favor of Maya and her way of doing things, especially after it becomes a matter of personal revenge for her, but the questions Boal and Bigelow mean to raise about whether Maya's mission really solves the problem should persist for anyone who watches the film thoughtfully. Zero Dark Thirty respects its audiences' intelligence -- whether it respects history remains subject to fierce debate -- and the response to it suggests that many viewers aren't used to such a film. It'd be a shame if such a response cost Bigelow a chance at another Oscar, but while this is a compelling picture it may not endure as memorably as some of her previous films, apart from Chastain's performance, because of its relative lack of the action that had been her strong suit. It's neither Bigelow's best film nor the best film I've seen from 2012, but it's a strong picture just the same, and history rather than contemporary perceptions or prejudices will determine its ultimate worth.

DVR Diary: PORK CHOP HILL (1959)

Lewis Milestone's last work as a director was an episode of the TV show Arrest and Trial in 1964. He missed by just a short time a historic opportunity to apply his cinematic acumen to a fourth American war. Until then, every generation had its Milestone war film. The Great War generation got the first and best one, 1930's All Quiet on the Western Front, which arguably has not yet been topped as a movie portrayal of its subject. The "Greatest" generation got several World War II pictures, the best regarded of which is 1945's A Walk in the Sun. Filmed while the war was still on, Walk was inevitably a different kind of picture than All Quiet, though admirers credit it for a relative absence of propaganda and cliche -- much of which can be found in 1943's The North Star and 1944's The Purple Heart. Milestone continued to concern himself with WWII well into the Fifties, directing the decent Halls of Montezuma and a British commando movie, They Who Dare, that I haven't seen. Not until producer/star Gregory Peck recruited him for a dramatization of S.L.A. Marshall's account of the final battle for Pork Chop Hill in 1953 did Milestone turn his attention to the Korean conflict. The "police action" was a war Americans viewed with more ambivalence than the last one, and that gave Peck and Milestone leeway to make a grimmer, edgier picture while boasting of their fidelity to fact.

Peck played a real soldier, Joe Clemons, who led troops in the battle and survived to have a hand in the production. Clemons played talent scout in one noteworthy case, recruiting a fellow West Pointer and Korea veteran to play his real-life Japanese-American executive officer. Here, from a Garland UT newspaper, is the story of how George Shibata broke into the movies.

Shibata didn't get that Wagon Train part, as far as IMDB knows, but he did find work in movies and TV for another decade. I should have figured he had an inside track, since I assume James Shigeta otherwise had first crack at all Japanese-American roles in this period. Shibata brings credibility to a creditable performance that requires little in the way of histrionics and benefits from their absence.  Pork Chop Hill marks the movie debut not only of Shibata but of Martin Landau, who had been busy in TV previously and has only one prominent scene here. Shibata makes a better impression and better represents a certain inclusiveness, justified by facts, on the part of Clemons, Peck and Milestone. Korea was the first modern American war in which whites and blacks routinely fought side by side, and the producers make black actors conspicuous by their presence in comparison to most previous war movies. They actually take something of a chance by having the one malcontent in the cast be a black soldier played by Woody Strode. The part's a bit of a stretch for Strode, who has to play an angry malingerer grown sick and tired of a seemingly pointless fight. Peck as Clemons threatens Strode's "Franklin" (an intro notes that nearly all the soldiers' real names were used) with a court-martial and ten years in prison to keep him moving up the hill. Franklin finally snaps, luring Clemons into a trap where he can frag the officer and claim that he shot the man by mistake should Clemons fail to give the proper countersign. Rather than shoot Clemons, however, Franklin is more interested in making a speech -- one of the film's few false notes -- explaining his disinterest in Korea and his unwillingness to fight for anyone eles's cause. Clemons talks him down all too easily, but merely staging the scene was, as I said, taking a chance in this era. The film takes steps to pre-empt any conclusions that might be drawn from Strode's race by casting another black actor as a soldier of unquestioned loyalty and some eagerness to take Franklin down a few pegs. The Korean War was seen in retrospect as a laboratory in race relations, as illustrated not only by this film but by 1960's All the Young Men, in which Sidney Poitier must take command of a unit in the face of white distrust. I'll have to watch that sometime for comparison's sake.

In the starring role, Peck projects the same sort of harried professionalism that Shibata does. His frustration builds, without ever compromising his competence, as reinforcements, supplies, fresh weapons, etc. prove slow in coming, even as the military portrays him as the triumphant conqueror of the worthless hill. A professional tone prevails among the cast as a whole, with few of the actors getting real showcase moments except for Strode and Robert Blake as a somewhat dumbly heroic runner. The film's really about the situation rather than the personalities. Milestone can sink his teeth into the lethal pointlessness of the battle, as both Americans and Chinese acknowledge that Pork Chop has no strategic significance. Nevertheless, the battle has to be fought in order to prove a point to the Reds (the Chinese, one officer helpfully explains, are "not only Orientals, but Communists") who themselves want to prove a point to the Americans. The Chicoms are willing to spend blood and treasure to take the stupid hill just to show that they're willing. The Americans have to prove that they're no less willing, but it all reduces the actual soldiers, as they well realize, to chips on a bargaining or gambling table. Milestone occasionally cuts to the negotiations at Panmunjon in a way that seems designed to get you to root for a settlement before more soldiers die and to blame the Commies when negotiations stall. You also get chances to hiss the Reds when Milestone shows us a Chinese propaganda broadcaster exhorting the Yanks to surrender and tormenting them with Muzak renditions of "Autumn in New York" during lulls in the action.

As for the fighting, that's why Milestone is directing, and his old tricks still work. He stages some impressive nighttime hill climbing, and he never can go wrong with those lateral tracking shots of advancing troops he perfected in All Quiet. If Pork Chop's battle scenes don't have the visceral fury and terror of All Quiet's, the fact that Milestone doesn't speed up the action to synch it with machine-gun fire, as in the 1930 film, may have something to do with that. Pork Chop Hill is still an above-average battle picture, though the nearest it comes to All Quiet's intensity comes not on a proper battlefield but when the last 25 survivors of Clemons's unit barricade themselves in a shed, piling sandbags against the walls, doors and windows, as the Chinese hit the place with flamethrowers. It's a hell-raising climax and once it's resolved the film closes on a note of exhausted relief rather than victory, despite Peck's narrative boast that "millions of people live in freedom today because of what we did." The film itself belies that claim, and Milestone (despite alleged editorial tampering by Peck) found the right tone and note to close on. At his best, he has to be considered one of the better war-film directors ever, and he's near his best, probably for the last time, in Pork Chop Hill.

Gregory Peck was pretty impressed by his handiwork, as he explains in this trailer, uploaded by ClassicWarMovies1.

Pre-Code Parade: MEN MUST FIGHT (1933)

It would be going too far to call Edgar Selwyn's adaptation of a Broadway play as a buried treasure, but it's definitely a relic in any sense of the word. The sense I choose is "invaluable yet forgotten piece of pop culture history." You would think that a movie with a special-effects sequence of an aerial bombing of New York City might be better remembered today, at least among genre film fans. Let me restate the argument: you would think that a film in which the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge are blown up, released within months of King Kong, might occupy at least a footnote in film history. But I can't recall reading or hearing about Men Must Fight until TCM scheduled it for early Monday morning and I read the cable guide entry about New York being bombed in 1940. I say again: you would think, yet ...

The problem with Men Must Fight is that it takes a slow-burn approach to its subject within the framework of a drawing-room melodrama about a husband, a wife and a son. It starts in 1918 with an American flier (Robert Young) and his nurse girlfriend (Diana Wynyard) on the Western Front. There's another man, older and an officer, Ned Seward (Lewis Stone), but he knows when he's beat. But there's hope yet for him, for few characters in films have been so obviously doomed as Young's airman. When Laura, the nurse, pins her four-leaf clover on his uniform before a mission, it may as well be a nail through the lid of his coffin. As it turns out, he survives the crash but dies not long afterward. He's left something of himself behind, however, and for that reason Laura is reluctant to return to America when the war ends. That's when Seward, scion of an aristocratic line, chivalrously steps in to make an honest woman of Laura.

Twenty-two years later, Ned Seward is Secretary of State and Laura Seward is one of the country's leading peace advocates. They've worked in tandem, Ned having negotiated a major peace treaty with Eurasia, the other great power of 1940, and their son Bob (Phillips Holmes) has an irreverent attitude toward old-school patriotism that gets him in trouble with his girlfriend Peggy (Ruth Selwyn) and her mother. Bob had the gall to criticize a crowd that nearly lynched a "Bolshevik" who'd desecrated an American flag. It's a minor incident, but suddenly things don't seem quite so peaceful. And not long after, Ned takes a phone call from Washington and has to take a quick flight there. Things are falling apart fast after the assassination of the American ambassador to Eurasia -- it's an insult the nation will not tolerate. A show of force must be made for the sake of national honor. Ned insists on this, but Laura sticks to her pacifist guns. She organizes a peace rally that's televised across the country -- remember, this is 1940 -- in which she delivers a Lysistrata ultimatum, threatening a global birth strike if men won't renounce war. Her speech enrages a group of pool-playing louts watching at a nearby bar. They storm the coliseum where she's speaking, but a Secret Service detail gets her out safely. A crowd gathers outside the Seward home, but Ned calms them with his assurance that his own son will serve and sacrifice if war makes it necessary. But he didn't consult Bob before saying that, and Bob's having none of it. A nonviolent war of wills breaks out that climaxes with Ned's revelation that Bob is no Seward and, on top of that, unworthy of the honorable name. There's an extra edge to the three-way family conflict that emerges when Ned accuses Laura of raising Bob to hate war mainly because Bob's all she has left of her true love. Looked at from another angle, it's almost as if Ned is pushing for war in order to eliminate the symbol of his secret inadequacy as a lover. It's melodramatic in a hokey way, but it's also a little chilling.

And the war came. From all reports, our boys are getting their asses kicked by the Eurasians, who appear capable of projecting force across the Atlantic to take the Panama Canal and, need I add, bomb New York City. The bombing scene only lasts a couple of minutes, and the M-G-M special effects team isn't quite of RKO caliber, but the audacity of the vision, as giant facades come crashing down to street level, still impresses. Despite the high-profile hits, the city isn't really that much worse for wear, from appearances, and Laura Seward and Peggy manage to escape even though their car is caught in the middle of the bombing.  Still, Laura's injuries are enough to turn the tide for Bob. Against her wishes, he enlists. Against Ned's wishes, he doesn't join the chemical corps, as he'd wanted, but the air corps, where he'll be on the front line of fighting. From what Ned has told us about whole air fleets being wiped out by poison-gas projectiles, Bob has probably doomed himself. He hasn't exactly come to love war, either. It's still a "dirty, stupid business" to him, but he explains the title of the play (which M-G-M considered changing to What Women Give Up) by saying, more or less, that a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. The film closes with an impressive shot of a massive American formation flying over the city as three generations of women -- Peggy, Laura and Ned's mother (May Robson) watch with disgust from a balcony. The old lady has grown more convinced that women ought to rule the world, and Peggy now takes Laura's side, vowing never to let any son she has by Bob go to war, but all three seem resigned to things changing very little in the future.



The relatively sedate build-up to mayhem -- including a steamship scene with cameo by drunken master Arthur Housman -- who claims that Europeans don't appreciate alcohol because they never had to do without it like Americans had, has probably hurt the reputation of Men Must Fight more than anything else. For an impatient viewer, the first 40 minutes or so, at least until the riot at the Coliseum, will be like sitting through the romantic scenes in Marx Brothers films. It doesn't help that the film lacks especially charismatic actors, though Stone makes the most of his bleakly authoritarian Pre-Code persona. But these faults don't explain why Men Must Fight doesn't endure with genre fans for whom the bombing sequence should stand as some sort of cinematic milestone. I see two likely reasons for its neglect. First, while it can be called a science-fiction film for predicting the near future, it doesn't project far enough to remain relevant, compared to H. G. Wells's Things to Come, which resembles Men Must Fight for its first reel but then keeps pushing decades ahead. Second, and maybe more importantly, Men Must Fight envisions a future war but isn't really an anti-war movie. It isn't a pro-war movie, either. Its tone is ambivalent; its title is declarative rather than imperative; its attitude toward war is resignation rather than denunciation. The playwrights and adapters seem honestly to have aimed for balance, for letting both sides have their say and making their best arguments. It can't help but appear to equivocate on the crucial question of the age, and however honest or objective its equivocation, it can't help but damn the film for many viewers. But it's still a cinematic milestone, as far as I can tell, and an interesting study of attitudes toward war when the buildup to the real Second World War, which arrived a year ahead of schedule, had only just begun.

COMMISSAR (1967-88)

The Soviet Union was a censorious, repressive society, but its leaders and bureaucrats had a curious attitude toward film. Rather than destroy unacceptable movies, the U.S.S.R. tended to shelve them, presumably indefinitely. Even Stalin shelved Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible Part II rather than burn it, and under Khrushchev it saw the light of day. Likewise, the ambitious debut film of director Aleksandr Askoldov was shelved by the Brezhnev regime, ruining Askoldov's career, only to emerge in the days of Gorbachev. It was acclaimed then, but Askoldov, then still only in his fifties, appears never to have resumed his career. One wonders what the censors objected to. It may have been the decision to adapt a story by Vasili Grossman, a writer presumably on the outs with the government since his novel Life and Fate had been suppressed a few years earlier. But if that were the case, Askoldov shouldn't have gotten a green light at all. The real issue seems to have been form rather than content. Askoldov was one of many Soviet directors butting against the aesthetic limits of "socialist realism" in cinema. Like many an ambitious novice, he seems willing to try anything with the camera. That experimentation may have been off-putting to the extent that it expressed directorial individualism rather than an official vision of the civil war that followed the October Revolution. Commissar occasionally spills over from socialist realism into magical realism in a manner that can be stunning to the casual viewer but disconcerting if not offensive to Soviet aesthetic regulators. So-called totalitarian regimes seemed to distrust artistic experimentation, believing that all art had a propaganda function and should be comprehensible by the lowest common denominator. Yet I don't think viewers would have trouble getting Commissar. So some have speculated that the KGB objected to the film's supposed feminism, since the title character is a woman, or to its sympathetic treatment of Jews, though Askoldov's attitude may not be as positive as that speculation implies.  Maybe there just wasn't enough heroic march music; totalitarians dig that sort of thing.

The offending film focuses on Klavdia Vavilova (Nonna Mordyukova), a Red Army officer who arrives in a freshly-taken town and is quartered with the Magazannik family. She's left behind as unfit for duty because she's in the last stage of pregnancy. Yefim Magazannik (Rolan Bykov) is one of those "life-affirming" types, the kind who dances barefoot in his yard as some sort of prayer to God. He kvetches at having to give up his bedroom to the commissar, but he and his family prove friendly, the wife especially showing empathy, having five kids herself, with the pregnant officer. The boys in the family are rambunctious, and the way they're presented may be part of the problem the censors had with the film. For one thing, they like to play at war, pretending to cajole their sister's doll from a hiding place only to torture and execute it. Later, they treat the sister herself with some of the same childish brutality, calling her a "Yid" for extra measure. The offensive insinuation may have been that the Red Army's conduct may have inspired the boys' cruelty. They may have been offensive in another way in one scene when their mother is bathing them, only to be interrupted by troops passing through town. The curious kids rush out to watch, and Askoldov gives us one shot of their three naked penises through the passing wagons that could well have convinced Soviet censors that he was some kind of a pervert and could well give American viewers a little bit of the creeps. But the director may simply have meant them as symbols of innocence; a lot depends on the eye of the beholder.

For a while you think you know the direction the film's going. Klavdia is slowly domesticated, doing her share of household chores and clearly caring for her newborn. But the film takes a late turn when the approaching counterrevolutionary "White" army shells the town. Klavdia and the Magazanniks take shelter in a basement. The kids are panicking and crying, but Yefim calms them and entertains them by launching into one of his Tevye/Zorba-esque dances. In what becomes a dreamlike montage, he, his wife and the kids all dance past Klavdia in the darkness, urging her to join them. Then, in the film's most startling coup, the montage turns into a prophetic vision. Klavdia now sees Yefim doing a more subdued, submissive form of his dance as he and his family, all wearing Stars of David on their garments, are herded into a concentration camp as veteran inmates watch in their iconic striped pyjamas. Everything's there but the Nazi regalia -- though it can't be the 1940s because Yefim's kids are still kids. From there there's one more anxious episode as Klavdia rips apart the boarding covering a door so she can shelter her baby (temporarily left on a sidewalk) from an advancing army, and then the commissar's fate is sealed. She leaves the baby with the Magazanniks to raise as she hastily rejoins the Red Army for what looks like an unpromisingly undermanned assault on the enemy with a minimal orchestration of the Internationale playing as a coda.

So for all Askoldov's alleged philo-Semitism he (and presumably Grossman before him) seems to be saying that for all Yefim's quaint charm his attitude of faithful resignation is simply inadequate to the moment in history. It is not enough for Klavdia to put her faith in a higher power; she can't wait for things to happen, but must rejoin the struggle, even if that means sacrificing her motherhood, not to mention her life. That would seem to make her an exemplary Bolshevik and an ideal hero for a Soviet film. But Commissar seems to have been judged much as a Hollywood film would be under the studio system: the ending with its stark hint of sacrifice for its own sake isn't happy or affirmative enough to satisfy the audience the bosses presumes exist, or wants to exist. In short, a Soviet cultural bureaucrat was just as likely as a Hollywood studio bureaucrat to be a moron.

Visually, Commissar swings for the seats on every pitch, and Askoldov occasionally hits one out of the park. Apart from that stunning flash-forward to the Holocaust, the film's most arresting moment comes when Klavdia flashes back during labor to her wartime adventures and envisions the slaughter of her comrades. This scene climaxes with a host of saddled but riderless horses charging across a bridge and through the countryside, eventually accompanied by an eerie murmur of human voices. It left me wondering whether the scene had influenced Steven Spielberg's more restrained employment of riderless steeds in War Horse. Regardless, Askoldov's imagery has at least as much power as anything Spielberg achieved in his new film. Commissar is often self-indulgent but never in an annoying or pretentious way. Askoldov's show-offery doesn't distract from the forceful yet ambiguous point he wants to make about war. If it was too ambiguous for a 1967 commissar to comprehend, or too forceful for him to accept, those are badges of honor Askoldov and his move can wear with pride today.

LOST COMMAND (1966): The other Battle of Algiers

Of the two films released in 1966 about the "Battle of Algiers" -- the terrorist campaign aimed at driving France out of Algeria in the 1950s -- it is the colorful big-budget Hollywood production with an international cast of stars, not the monochrome semi-documentary with a cast of nobodies that has been almost completely forgotten. Yet Mark Robson's film had a head start on Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers, being based on an international best-seller and prize-winning French novel, The Centurions, by Jean Larteguy. It starred Anthony Quinn, still fairly fresh from Zorba the Greek, alongside Alain Delon at the height of his stardom. So why has film history ignored Lost Command and exalted Battle of Algiers? For one thing, Pontecorvo's is the better film. It set a new standard for simulated realism and by siding with the insurgents it captured the radical zeitgeist of the late 1960s. By identifying with, if not siding with, the French occupiers, Robson's film could only appear reactionary, a Franco-American counterpart to The Green Berets, by comparison with Pontecorvo's Battle. Lost Command is innovative neither in narrative nor in visual style. But if it's indisputably inferior to Battle, does that make it an objectively bad movie?

Robson's movie probably is some kind of cinematic landmark, if only for being an early portrayal of the west's failure to subdue Vietnam. Lost Command opens during the battle of Dien Bien Phu, as paratroopers arrive to relieve an embattled unit commanded by Lt. Col. Raspeguy (Quinn). The colonel is irked to learn that his superiors have sent him a unit historian, Capt, Esclavier (Delon), but the academic proves a decent soldier -- not that that helps the unit much. They're forced to surrender (to Burt "Kato" Kwouk) and are imprisoned for some time, but under Raspeguy's leadership they largely retain cohesion and morale.

Freed at last, the men return to France, where Raspeguy courts an influential widow (Michele Morgan) who might help him secure a generalship. He can help his own cause with a good showing in Algeria, where the natives are restless. He regathers much of his old unit, including an initially reluctant Esclavier but not Lt. Mahidi (George Segal), who had returned to his native Algeria after their release. In Algeria, they gradually learn that Mahidi, who had been humiliated by racist French settlers and saw a relative killed during a protest, has taken his tactical expertise to the insurgents. While he concentrates on building a guerrila army, his sister (Claudia Cardinale) smuggles bomb-making materials to terrorists in the Casbah, eventually using an infatuated Esclavier -- who doesn't learn of her family ties until later -- as dupe to get her past checkpoints. The French forces, with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm, resort to torture to break the terror network and learn the whereabouts of Mahidi's army-in-the-making. Raspeguy leads the attack to destroy Mahidi's army and earn his generalship, but will he keep his promise to Esclavier to take their old comrade alive?...

As the poster said, they lived and loved and fought:

Anthony Quinn and Michele Morgan (above),
and Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale (below)

What we have here is the age-old conflict between the man of action and the intellectual. Raspeguy is a "beautiful beast of war," so called by the widow because he furiously rejects her first description of him as a "beautiful animal of war." Raspeguy hates being called an "animal" with the passion of one who's been called that frequently. Maybe something didn't translate well from the French, but I'm not clear on why "beast" is any better. The colonel's sensitivity has something to do with his background as a Basque peasant -- and the character's standing as an ethnic outsider among Frenchmen presumably explains Anthony Quinn's casting alongside a mostly French ensemble who speak English in their own well-accented voices -- with the conspicuous exception of Jean Servais as a general who talks in the familiar voice of Paul Frees. One weakness of this picture is the buildup it gives Raspeguy's animus to "animal," which ends up having much less payoff than we might expect.

Alain Delon has more to work with as a more sensitive personality who struggles to avoid the coarsening effect of war. Literally dropped into Quinn's unit at the opening, he's the audience-identification character and the film's political conscience. He isn't unsympathetic to the cause of Algerian independence, and puts up the most resistance not just to the use of torture against the terrorists (novelist Larteguy is credited by Wikipedia with inventing the torture-justifying "ticking bomb" scenario), but also to the French reliance on masked informers. He cracks, however, when he learns how the Cardinale character had duped him. Fresh from his principled protests, he beats her up in a rage that he appears quickly to regret, extracting more gently from her the whereabouts of Mahidi in return for Raspeguy's promise to spare the miliant's life. Esclavier will later have cause to call Raspeguy the "A-word," but while the result finally convinces him to quit the military, the moment is still fairly underwhelming.

What isn't underwhelming at all is the spectacular location work of Robson and cinematographer Robert Surtees in Spain. All the military engagements are engagingly shot, none more so than the climactic raid on Mahidi. Robson establishes the insurgents' location at the ruins of a Roman temple in the hills, and uses that temple as a reference point to make the rival forces' positions perfectly clear in every shot. However retrograde Lost Command may be from a political standpoint, it succeeds quite nicely as a colorful military action film. It may still go down as a curiosity in the Quinn and Delon filmographies, but it certainly doesn't deserve an obscurity that persists despite an official DVD release from Sony some time ago.

I might have suggested that it should endure alongside Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers to represent the other point of view, but that's not really true -- Robson's film does not oppose Pontecorvo's. Lost Command ends with the implication that Algeria's demand for independence is irrepressible, and the film never claims that the Algerians were undeserving of freedom. But it suffers in comparison to Battle because Robson never makes Mahidi the equal antagonist that the character's backstory prepares him to be. Once he turns against the France, however just his cause may be, Mahidi himself becomes little more than a menace. The movie could have used some sort of confrontation, however contrived, between Mahidi and Raspeguy or Esclavier so the insurgent could explain more eloquently or convincingly what drove a soldier who refused preferential treatment, as a presumed victim of colonialism, from his Vietnamese captors, to make war on his erstwhile comrades-in-arms. But the filmmakers may have been playing it safe, since you can stretch the credibility of George Segal as an Algerian only so far. Nevertheless, history has judged Mahidi's real-life counterparts the true protagonists of the Algerian uprising, while cinema history has judged The Battle of Algiers the definitive film version of that event. Those judgments can stand, but Lost Command should retain historical interest for presenting, not the other, but just another point of view in dramatically forceful style.

And here's the US trailer, uploaded to YouTube by SupportingActor.

COUP DE GRACE (Der Fangschuss, 1976)

Here's a period piece in German, set in the 1910s, and shot in black and white. I couldn't help but be reminded of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, but for people more familiar with German cinema of the 1970s, Haneke's film was probably reminiscent of Der Fangschuss. Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Marguerite Yourcenar's novel has the same stark atmosphere of superficial austerity belied by lurid goings-on, and unlike Haneke's movie, it has explosions. It's set in the war after the war, the international intervention against the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. In the Baltic region it fell to defeated Germany to aid the "Whites" against the Reds, and this new fight brings a Germano-Russian soldier back to his family estate, where White troops are being billeted and Bolshevik shells are falling. Konrad (Rudiger Kirchstein) brings with him his war buddy Erich (Matthias Lobich), who catches the eye of Konrad's sister Sophie (Margarethe von Trotta, Schlondorff's wife and co-writer and a director herself). Sophie has stayed on in the danger zone for many reasons, and Erich's presence adds more. The odd thing about her attraction to the reactionary soldier is that Sophie is reputed to be a Bolshevik sympathizer. Odder still is her obsession with a man who proves steadfastly uninterested in her. If anything, he takes more interest in Konrad, which only infuriates Sophie into transgressive retaliation. She becomes an open Bolshevik, leaving the estate to take up arms with the Reds.

Sophie's politics are to be taken on faith, since she gets little opportunity and shows little inclination to state her views. It may well be that Yourcenar, Trotta and Schlondorff see her radicalization as more of a personal than a political thing. That's the conclusion I draw, at least, from her heightened militancy following Erich's repeated rebuffs. It seems more like a demand for Erich's attention, as is her flirting with subordinate soldiers. Her personal war with Erich reaches its ultimate resolution when she's captured. Refusing Erich's implicit offer of preferential treatment, she makes a demand in return. She wants him to execute her himself -- the Fangschuss of the title. I'm tempted to think the climactic act is intended symbolically as a coup de grace to the old regime of German gentry in the Baltics, if not to a generation already mortally ravaged by World War I.

Schlondorff employs just enough production values to make his low-level warfare convincing without turning his story needlessly into an epic. The film has impressive monochrome cinematography by Igor Luther and a typically elegiac score by Stanley Myers of Deer Hunter fame. Overall, however, the film left me cold. While I admit that it was meant coldly, I also felt that Sophie's story was historically irrelevant. I didn't get a real sense of how much she was a product of her time or social environment, or how representative of anything she was supposed to be. Perhaps she wasn't supposed to be representative, and we were simply meant to be fascinated or appalled by her obsession and its consequences. Trotta gives a decent performance in the role, but it's the sort of character who can easily end up without any audience sympathy and whose fate might well inspire a collective "so what?" regardless of Trotta and Schlondorff's intentions. Some scenes of her actually fighting or at least living with the Reds might have made a difference here. The closest we come to this is a sentimental scene near the end when she's managed to steal Erich's cigarette case during her interrogation and shares her swag with her fellow prisoners. I expected more engagement with this side of Sophie from filmmakers who make so much of their political engagement in the interviews included on the Criterion DVD. But Coup de Grace isn't quite engaged enough, nor, for a film dedicated to Jean-Pierre Melville, thrilling enough to stand the test of time.

A STEP INTO THE DARKNESS (Buyuk Oyun, 2009)

The blurb on the box cover claims that Atil Inac's film "Plays like Hurt Locker from the opposite vantage point." However attractive that comment may have seemed to Vanguard Cinema, the distributor of the DVD, it misrepresents the film, which portrays a woman caught between the two fires of American occupation and jihadist terror. In war, contrary to what some may believe, there can be more than two sides.

Filmed on location in the Turkmen and Kurdish regions of Iraq and in Turkey, Buyuk Oyun is the story of Cennet (the name roughly rhymes with "Jeanette"), a young Turkmen woman who takes a lucky trip to an outhouse just as an American unit rolls into her village and shoots up her family. This is as much as we see of the Americans in the film, and they're shown as blunderers rather than villains. Nevertheless, Cennet bears a grudge. Her first priority, however, is to go to Kirkuk, where her one remaining brother works at a barter mart.

After the horrors Cennet (Suzan Genc) has seen, moving on isn't as easy as it looks.

In Kirkuk, Cennet learns that her brother was injured in a terrorist bombing and airlifted to Turkey for specialized medical care. Without a passport, she resolves to cross the border to find her brother. She entrusts herself to a group of smugglers ("bandits" from a more skeptical perspective) and gets raped for her trouble. Despairing and dishonored, she tries to kill herself by jumping off a cliff into a river, but she's fished out by good samaritans who finally get her into Turkey. She ends up in the tender care of a jihadist cell led by a goggle-eyed fanatic. He promises to inquire about her brother, who had been transferred to an Istanbul hospital, but blatantly lies to her, telling her without checking that the brother is dead. He quite consciously wants to mold her into a suicide bomber, cynically describing her and another woman as "lambs" who'll make quite a show by blowing themselves up simultaneously. This sets up the sort of suspense we've seen before. Will Cennet go through with the bombing? Will her suicide vest function or not? Will she manage to encounter her brother and learn the truth before she throws her life away? Without spoiling too much, I'll say I was favorably surprised by the lack of resolution at the end of the picture.

If sacrificing one's life is such a great thing, how come guys like this never do it themselves?

Atil Inac and co-writer Avni Ozgurel clearly oppose both the Americans and the jihadists. Their sympathies are with the simple people caught in the middle, whose lives are likely to be made no better no matter which side wins. While the jihadist leader is clearly the main villain of the piece (and his final scene raises questions about possible ties to the U.S.), Buyuk Oyun uses Cennet's odyssey to put a human face on a suicide terrorist. She is no Islamist. She isn't out to conquer the world in the name of a Caliphate. She doesn't hate anybody's freedom. But she's angry and vengeful and, most importantly, believing her brother dead, she has no family and thus, to her mind, nothing to live for. That detail may illustrate a significant cultural difference between Iraqis and Americans. We might expect an American so victimized and isolated to grit her teeth, start over and find her own place in the world. Cennet doesn't seem to believe that she has her own place as an individual; without her family, and without honor after the rape, she feels that her life means nothing and may as well be given up in some meaningful way. She thinks differently by the end, but her experiences have alienated her to the point where she seems to be more isolated, more alone than she really is.

Suzan Genc made her movie debut playing Cennet and makes a sympathetic impression. As a director, Inac has a strong eye for the landscapes of northern Iraq, but some montages seem padded to accommodate Sabri Tulug Tirpan's score. He opts for some narrative telescoping through montage that throws away some strong opportunities for drama, especially when we get to Cennet's indoctrination into jihadism. Inac may simply have been careful to avoid having Cennet espouse opinions that might lose her audience sympathy. As for the audience, Buyuk Oyun did the festival circuit before opening in Turkey earlier this year, and apparently hasn't played theatrically in the United States. One scene in which Cennet goes topless to apply dye to her breasts, out of fear that her explosion might expose naughty fragments to unwanted eyes, makes me suspect that Inac's primary audience is the global art-house crowd rather than the Turkish public. At the very least I'd bet that that scene isn't playing in Turkish or Iraqi theaters.

A Step Into the Darkness isn't the first suicide-bomber movie from a Muslim filmmaker and isn't necessarily the best one. But the setting and the story make me want to recommend this film as something like a moral imperative to those who still wonder why some folks in the Middle East have bad intentions toward Westerners. I consider myself fortunate that the Albany Public Library acquired the film. More libraries should do the same.

This English-subtitled trailer was uploaded to YouTube by tftyapim.

THE DIVINE WEAPON (2008)

Back in the fifteenth century the hottest arms race on Earth was being waged by two nations that didn't even know what century it was. The Ming Dynasty of China and the Korean kingdom of Joseon kept their own time, which is only fair, since they were way ahead of Christendom when it came to technology. Dwarfed by the Ming, Joseon sought any advantage available, despite the efforts of appeasers who counseled submission to China. The equalizer was the "divine weapon," which was a rocket-powered delivery system for masses of arrows. Joseon has been working on such a system for a while as Kim Yoo-jin's film opens, and one powerful family has been demoted for failing to perfect a weapon. Sul-ju, the scion of the disgraced family, now hustles for a living as head of a merchant clan. Fate, if not national strategy, makes him the host of Hong-li, the daughter of the current Divine-Weapon designer. He was killed by Ming agents, who took his design manual and are now after his daughter. She was her father's assistant and has much of his technical know-how. Hong-li and Sul-ju are reluctantly thrown together in an emergency effort to build Divine Weapons before the Ming figure out how to build them first. In the process, Sul-ju will get over his grudge against his government and his now-mercenary impulses, Hong-li will come down off her high horse and lose some of her self-righteous attitude, each will learn from and fall in love with the other, and a hella lot of Mings and barbarian Jurchen tribesmen will find themselves in a pointy metal deathstorm without their umbrellas.

Woman of learning, man of action: together they conceive the Divine Weapon.

This Korean production doesn't have the budget Zhang Yimou had for Curse of the Golden Flower, though Divine Weapon is an expensive film by national standards (costing something like $10,000,000). The limitations show when Kim resorts to subpar CGI, but for the most part the film benefits from its smaller scale and more personal, sometimes more visceral violence. It's a patriotic film, arguably an epic, but far less pretentious than the Chinese film. Divine Weapon has more of a Hollywood feel in its focus on two attractive, initially mismatched protagonists who fall in love, and the personable quality of the leads, Jeong Jae-yeong and Han Eun-jeong, keeps you interested during the buildup to the big battlefield unveiling of the title device.

Your Divine Weapon comes in three models. Your basic Divine Weapon will shoot scores of arrows through the air to punch holes in the enemy, but their penetrating power's not so great. A guy on horseback carrying a small shield in one hand can take a hit on the shield and keep on riding. That's when you want your Standard Divine Weapon. This is actually the original version before it was redesigned, and the objective originally wasn't to pin some enemy mook to the earth. The idea here was to blow him up. This baby comes with an explosive charge on each arrow that'll bring down the man and the horse. Stick a guy with four or five of these and it ain't pretty.

But sometimes it's just not enough to blow up a barbarian on a horse. Say you've got a bunch of the enemy all in one place. That's when you can really use the Grand Divine Weapon. Let's keep this simple: it's a ballistic missile. Joseon had'em three hundred years before Europe did, the film says, and when our heroes bring it on to mop up the retreating enemy, it's a genuine "you have got to be shittin' me" moment, but in a good way -- apart from the botched CGI of the explosions. By comparison, the clouds of arrows on the first volleys have a certain lethal elegance.

Choose your poison.

Some critics (particularly Chinese) have questioned the accuracy of the film and the claims made for Korean inventiveness, but Divine Weapon is guilty of no more than the usual cinematic license. Before watching, I wondered whether a film that shows Koreans sticking it to China would have contemporary political overtones, but having watched it I don't think so, unless some Chinese have real thin skins. The English subtitles, at least, scrupulously refer to Joseon's oppressors as "the Ming" rather than "China" (and it's a great name for a villainous entity, isn't it?) and the enemy could just as easily be seen as a generic tyrant rather than as specifically Chinese.

If anything, I had a stronger impression that the Jurchen barbarians were meant to stand in for North Korea, in which case the film's focus on wonder weapons has obvious relevance. The subtext might be that the South could match the North bomb for bomb, missile for missile, and even overmatch the dismal bolsheviks if not for geopolitical constraints. Strangely, Divine Weapon reminded me of 1950s sci-fi movies in which the Japanese save the world with super weapons in subconscious do-overs of the end of World War II. In this case, South Korea looks to its historic past for assurance that it can deal with the Northern enemy if it comes down to a fight. But you don't need to read any politics into it to enjoy this unartistic but effective adventure film. It isn't on the cutting edge of Korean or Asian cinema by any measure, but it's a piece of pop cinema that might be popular anywhere, depending on how you translate it.

This English-subtitled trailer was uploaded to YouTube by ArtsAllianceAmerica.